Our purchasing decisions are telling Apple that we’re happy to buy computers and watch them die on schedule. When we choose a short-lived laptop over a more robust model that’s a quarter of an inch thicker, what does that say about our values?

I see lots of excitement within the GNU/Linux communities about the new, stable Skype. It makes me sad: it’s the worse kind software to be excited for. It’s designed to spy on you, it has a proprietary protocol, the software itself is badly designed, poor UI and lacks of many features compared to others. What’s more, using software like Skype that is not interoperable with other voice/messaging systems allows Microsoft to push in it creepy features like advertising next to your personal conversation. The network effect created by Skype is bad for humanity, we should treat Skype as a necessary evil and work to make people aware of reasonable alternatives.

I’d be much happier if I saw communities cheering for the alternatives. For example, I wish Canonical added a xmpp/jingle service to its One product (and I’d love to pay for it). I wish the community knew that Google allows federation in its Google Talk service: you can reach your friends that use Google.com from your own jingle server. These are the things that we need, more than yet another proprietary protocol and software to take away our options.

Google+ will be launching ads soon. Given Google’s experience with Adwords & statistics, expect them to be better targeted.

Wow! Do people out there use social networks to watch ads? Seriously, folks. It’s one thing when you’re searching for something, having a relevant ad served in your face can be a good thing. That’s what makes Google rich. But when I’m reading an article on the NYTimes or chatting with my friends, advertising is just background noise that I learned to filter, both unconsciously and consciously with AdBlock. That’s why I never believed that Facebook can make lots of money selling ads inside Facebook (it has a shot selling targeted ads outside of its wall, through OpenGraph and the like) and that’s why Twitter is having such hard time finding a revenue stream (because serving ads that are relevant to people that are looking for what’s new and relevant for them is very hard).